MNL65

System Productivity

A landmark work published by the Urban Institute defines the difference between output, outcome, and efficiency measures:

“Outcome measures: assess service quality and service results, primarily from the citizen's and service user's point of view.”

“Output measures: counts of physical products of service, such as number of lane-miles paved or number of police (or fire) calls answered.”

“Efficiency measures: ratios of amount of input to the amount of product produced with that input. Traditionally, the indicator has been expressed as the ratio of cost to amount of output (for example, cost per lane-miles paved).”

“These other measures can be quite helpful in managing resources and tracking workload and productivity (author's note: which is “production rate” as it is used in JPM). In general, they use data that are easier to obtain than data for outcome measure. However, such measures tell citizens and government officials nothing about the effectiveness and quality of services provided; outcome measures do this[1].”